tricksypixie asked:
Hello I love your three houses takes and I would LOVE to hear about Jeritza written as transfem?? I have not looked at his writing in a While but the idea is so good, please tell me all about it
strawberry-crocodile answered:
So I made a very roughshod post about this a few months ago, but I recently wrote an essay to just discuss this topic for some friends, and I figured I’d preview it here.
For starters, I’d just like to establish that a lot of these things I bring up generally aren’t going to exclusively point to the character as transfem; any one of them probably has a number of explanations you could come up with. However, I hope you can see that there are a lot of coincidences here and appreciate that my reading isn’t baseless.
Additionally, I want to clarify that I don’t see a transgender reading of Jeritza as contrasting aspects of the character such as their DID or their rejection of their childhood when they should be more accepting of it, but rather as acting in concert with it. DID is frequently, for lack of a better term, comorbid with gender dysphoria, and that sense of dissociation from one’s childhood followed by a gradual acceptance of who you once were is also an experience I’ve seen among many of my transgender friends.
That said, let’s get down to some examples, starting with Jeritza’s relationship to men. It is clear that Jeritza does not like men. The only man that Jeritza can support, between two games, is the male avatar, who has the ability to support everyone. This is a particularly obvious gap when one notes that they have no support with Hubert, who was a co-conspirator and fellow confidant to Edelgard, surely a relationship that would be ripe for drama. With women, however, Jeritza is constantly patient with them, entertaining Constance’s eccentricities, explaining themselves to Bernadetta, and letting Manuela try to teach them. I find their Manuela support particularly sweet, as it ends with Jeritza complimenting Manuela’s skill as a teacher, rather than her beauty and eligibility as a bachelorette, after having been rather quiet throughout the support. Jeritza is someone who is aware of the struggles women in Fodlan face and seems to have a much easier time connecting to them than they do with men. I’d like to contrast this with Sylvain; although their background is not identical, it’s similar, but Sylvain ended up a raging misogynist, and Jeritza ended up with a love and appreciation for women as people.
I also want to circulate back to Jeritza’s relationship to their past as Emile. The case has been made that Jeritza’s rejection of the Emile identity is a rejection of their kindness and softness, and I can appreciate the reading, but I don’t know if that’s the only possible way to read this. Notably, Jeritza’s C support with Byleth has Jeritza plainly state that they are using the Jeritza identity while at rest eating ice cream, and also plainly state that Jeritza is “myself”. We also at no point see Jeritza fall back on the Emile name in their supports with Manuela, when their B support is about Jeritza learning to present a more approachable, kindly face. The identity of Jeritza is not excluded from the sweetness of Emile; after all, the Death Knight identity is there, concentrating all that bloodlust, so it’s interesting how hard Jeritza insists they not be called their previous name.
Now, let’s get to the juiciest piece of evidence; Maria Jeritza. Names in this game are very important and very telling of the author’s intentions behind the character; look at the Galatea household, named after a story about men attempting to literally create the ideal woman, or how the houses of Liecester are named for King Lear. The name Jeritza, very clearly, comes from a woman. Specifically, an opera singer by the name of Maria Jeritza. Maria was an operetta who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a cursory glance at her Wikipedia page gives some damning evidence. For starters, her performance won her the patronage of then Emperor of Austria, a clear parallel to our Jeritza’s relationship with Edelgard, and the operas she performed in had similar themes to Jeritza’s story; Der Kuhreigen is an opera written with her in mind where she stars a woman who dies tragically in the french revolution, and Lohengrin is a story about a mysterious powerful knight hiding his identity. (My personal favorite similarity is that Maria was nicknamed “The Moravian Thunderbolt”- now what element of black magic does Jeritza learn?) The character of Jeritza being named after a woman, to me, clearly means something.
(Also this isn’t part of a larger paragraph but I’ll point out that mask tied to the Jeritza identity has bright red eyeliner)
So we have a character who is named after a woman, has a previous masculine name that they constantly reject, and has a much stronger relationship to women than to men. This is already, in my eyes, very strong evidence, but now I’m going to bring up my personal experiences with gender and having been AMAB and talk about the themes Jeritza has as a character.
Jeritza’s core theme is that of internalized monsterhood- that everything about them is Wicked and Dangerous, something that brings them great shame and drives them to isolation. That sort of feeling is not, of course, exclusive to the transgender experience, but in my case it very strongly aligns with it. I have felt, and still feel like, a sort of disgusting inhuman monster because of my body and Bad Thoughts, and so much of that is tied to the disparity between my body and how I wish to present. We even see this feeling of monsterhood is tied to Jeritza’s masculine body- namely, their resemblance to their father. In Houses, they call their own eyes “accursed” and compare them unfavorably to their mother’s and sister’s. In Hopes, they directly compare their face to their father’s and state that they have a hard time with mirrors- a symptom of both DID and gender dysphoria. That fear of hurting someone, that feeling of being unworthy to talk to the women around you, that is painfully relatable to me, and something that took me from an interest in the character to my current obsession.
And, content warning ahead, Jeritza is plainly suicidal. They talk repeatedly about both receiving recompense for their wicked deeds, and offer Byleth the chance to kill them repeatedly. Trans suicide rates are something commonly discussed, and while suicidal ideation is certainly not exclusive to trans people, there is a connection.
Jeritza, in my eyes is supremely relatable to my own transfem experience, and the number of similarities to it are hard to brush off as simply coincidence, especially in a game that has as much character work in it as Three Houses. Compare Linhardt’s clear symptoms of ADHD, Edelgard’s PTSD. The writers of this game are clearly willing to write characters who go beyond the assumed default human experience without explicitly highlighting it, and frankly, I very much suspect that someone intended for Jeritza von Hrym to be read as transgender.
…i may have put way too much time into this
Can’t say I was expecting that.
She isn’t alone 12s passed out on the floor
This is actually the best intro to a porno that has ever existed
There is no way this is a porno
This is the best porno there has ever been.
The way he says “HEY WHAT THE FUCK” shaped me as a person
If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.
(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)
Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.
Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.
Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and
But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.
So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.
But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.
But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.
So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.
You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.
The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.
Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.
Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.
You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.
Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.
Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.
Never mind that last part.
And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.
Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."
To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.
It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.
So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:
Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.
Also, it's safe to bet cash money that almost none of the people running OR investing in those companies know what a pig is.
I mean metaphorically. I am pretty sure most of them could at least identify, say, a cartoon pig, if you showed them a good clear picture of it.
They came to the pig show. They salivated over that prize pig. And then they went back to their utterly unrelated companies built largely on bombastic rich-guy fantasies of what would make money. And tried to figure out how to fit a pig in there.
What I'm saying is that AI is medium-useful as a way to automate a series of somewhat repetitive tasks. Like data entry, or scanning and summarizing a bunch of tweets, or photoshopping pictures a certain way.
And you can just... find a tool that does something like that in the field you want to work in, go through a few tutorials with it, and put AI shit on your resume and cover letter.
Ride those pig-loving rats to that maritime job!
diezmil10000